I tend to stick with technical articles and how to guides. But there's something else I've been worrying about for months now. How will VMware be handling the move toward vSphere 5.5 and eventually 6.0, where the vSphere Client will be entirely gone, completely replaced by the vSphere Web Client. That means you will have to have a VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance) to attach to, making VCSA is no longer just optional. This VCSA is largely pre-configured, a great match for the home lab, and finally a decent performer (on SSD). But it needs a license to go longer than 60 days. So, where's this leave the free hypervisor user, who abides by EULAs and license restrictions, legitimately avoiding the time bombs?

We can already see the inevitable progression toward Windows 32 bit client oblivion in the current 5.5 release. You only need the client to get the VCSA quickly deployed. After that, all the good stuff is only gotten from the vSphere Web Client. This is a rude awaking for many who may not have tried ESXi before. Examples of this good stuff include VMs with greater than 2TB drives, mapping USB 3.0 ports to VMs, better GPU handling, and vSphere Flash Read Cache. These compelling features are locked to hardware version 10 VMs, which cannot be managed from the vSphere Client, and cannot be run on ESXi 5.1. Hmm. See the issue?

A VMware Community post went up a few hours ago, that really highlights the frustration and uncertainty at play here:

The good news: I upgraded to 5.5 and now my USB 3.0 adapter works. I connected it to my Win7 x64 VM and so far it's functioning as expected. My adapter is a NEC based chipset marketed as the StarTech 2 Port PCI Express SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Card Adapter Model PEXUSB3S2

The bad news: I am a home user and have uncovered an unfortunate issue with the free version of ESXi 5.5. vSphere client no longer supports editing VM settings of a version 10 machine. You must use vSphere Web Client which requires vCenter. I downloaded a trial copy of vCenter Appliance and vSphere Enterprise Plus so that I could make the required pass-thru edit from vSphere Web Client.

Many of us have legitimate access to 365 day corporate use trials, or full blown vSphere license keys, but I realize most folks don't. Despite Signs of Life for the VMware VMTN Subscription Movement (Chris Wahl, Aug 29 2013), right now, we have no VMTN. And vSphere 5.5 has arrived. With Microsoft recently pulling back on TechNet, it'll also be interesting to see how VMware reacts, given a good numbers of consultant types that can't afford MSDN may wind up losing their easy access to Hyper-V.

Licensing of vSphere has never been simple, and 5.5 is no exception. See the 402 hits for "licensing" in the vCenter online manual here, and pictured at right.

This sort of thing really is a deterrent for folks that otherwise might be interested in ESXi, like literally everybody I met at the MSDN/TechNet heavy home server enthusiast crowd I spent the past weekend with.

This article is just meant to start to openly discuss the elephant in the room, posing the tough questions weighing on many IT Pro's minds these past 2 days of "playing" with the generally available vSphere 5.5 (ESXi + vCenter).

1) How are you handling the vCenter requirement?

2) Does it matter that vSphere 5.5 Datacenter can be rebuilt in under an hour, preserving all your VMs, side-stepping those 60 day time bombs, even though the only thing spent in this scenario is your valuable time? (up to you to follow your EULAs)

VMware vCenter Server Editions pricing

I honestly don't have answers, or any insight about where things are headed for the already entirely unsupported home virtualization crew. But I do know that I'm very curious to hear what you all think, my valued TinkerTry visitors. Don't worry, I don't give out homework often!

Closely related threads:

In my original post above, I didn't call out, why VMware? We each have our own answers to that one. For me personally, it's simple really. ESXi is at a vast majority of my customer's sites, and as far as I know, it's the only bare metal hypervisor that lets me test all the other big names in hypervisors. Testing by nesting, on just one Core i7 system I affectionately call vZilla. Invaluable for self training purposes, and very relevant to my career in IT. See also:

Hopefully this post help someone who was in the same situation. Good option is to go for Intel based NICs which in most cases are supported. The best option is to check the VMware HCL before buying a NIC, still.

The good news is, in under 2 hours, I got my ESXi 5.5 lab rebuilt, as a sort of exercise, to be sure my instructions are still accurate. It included me injecting Realtek NIC support into the ISO, using the Andreas Peetz ESXi-Customizer, which I explained in my very popular post here. I then went on to fix ASMedia drivers for full access to all SATA3 ports on my mobo, also care of Andreas. Finally, I got the health of my LSI-9265-8i seen again, by injecting a VIB. None of this was that hard, but I will write all that up separately, especially for the folks out there who invested in a vZilla-like build. I've already recorded a long video of all of this, but it'll take days of edits to get it all into a consumable, sensible form to publish.

The bad news is this somewhat worrisome post, by the same Andreas Peetz:

I recently became aware of that with vSphere 5.5 VMware introduced a new Native Driver Architecture for ESXi. William Lam has written an excellent blog post describing the motivation behind and the benefits of this new architecture. I will shortly summarize it here, but also add some concerns about the way it is introduced, because - in the future - it might severely limit the ability to run ESXi on white box and commodity hardware.

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